You know that saying about making choices in life? Like if you're faced with the dilemma of dating Siamese twins and you can’t recall which one you hooked up with the last time? Either way you lose and it was that kind of dilemma I faced the other evening at the restaurant Arrabbiata with their food server "Main Man Ray" (I 'm using the moniker from Rain Man to be kind). I was told the food and service are quite wonderful at this small Downtown Phoenix eatery but this was an experience that calls to mind the painful and surreal, as if having to listen to Ashton Kutcher try and sell me a digital camera while begging me to follow him on Twitter.
You see my "Main Man Ray" isn’t an idiot savant or autistic, in fact he's not even an idiot. No, my "Main Man Ray actually is quite good. Quite good at being the worst food server since Jack Nicholson’s waitress in that old classic “Five Easy Pieces.”
Upon arrival at Arrabbiata and being unable to locate the hostess, my date and I fought our way through the empty restaurant to a barely clean metal table encrusted with the dying remnants of botulism. Dusting off the menu, I asked for bottled water (still as opposed to sparkling) as we perused the offerings. After beating a large fly away from our table, we decided to play it safe and split an appetizer, settling on the Lower Napa Valley Windmill Farm’s vine ripened tomatoes drizzled with sublime virgin olive oil on top of semi soft Burnetts Dairy Coop mozzarella and carefully aged and balanced (on the side) balsamic vinegar of Modena. (Who thinks up the descriptions of this stuff?)
Five minutes had now passed and I was getting pretty damn thirsty, still no bottled water and to make matters worse, I couldn’t find my "Main Man Ray" anywhere. Seven minutes later, no agua, no "Main Man Ray" and my eyes could no longer tear. At about the ten minute mark, my girl was fading due to dehydration, my throat began to slowly contract due to lack of bodily fluids and I thought that heroin would be legalized before he surfaced again. At minute thirteen, we realized something was up as we heard the toilet flush for the second time with the sound of swirling water bouncing off porcelain echoing loudly into the empty dining room. At that very moment, my "Main Man Ray" came walking out of the men’s bathroom tucking his shirt into his pants. We looked at each other with both fear and disgust, as it was quite obvious that Ray had just pinched a loaf or as they say in prison; dropped the Cosby Kids off at the pool.
We watched in horror, (traditionally reserved for Wednesday nights when we see larvae consume zebra flesh recently felled by packs of hyenas on the National Geographic Channel) as he brought a plate over to our table. But thank God, instead of what we ordered three weeks earlier, he incorrectly delivered a plate of mixed Italian meats, cheeses and vegetables, which unfortunately looked like one of the Cosby kids he had recently deposited in the pool. As we slid our chairs back and got up to remove ourselves from this nightmare, the manager, some tool with an Ed Hardy dress shirt (an oxymoron I know) momentarily glanced our way, but ultimately must have concluded that whatever was going on in our station was standard fare and thus didn’t rise to the level of a Homeland Security Defcon 4 alert requiring his immediate attention. As my "Main Man Ray" opened his pie hole in confusion and a bit of drool began to form in the corner of his mouth, we thanked our lucky stars that we had not ingested any food, that my "Main Man Ray" was a kind, but benign moron and though I know he wanted to speak, I am certain the only words he could utter were, "Kmart Sucks."
“No Ray, you suck and so does Arrabbiata”.
We tossed a penny onto the table and exited stage left.
To read more of Veruca Salt's columns visit the following link:
http://www.examiner.com/x-12558-Phoenix-All-Things-Hipster-Examiner
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